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Article we discussed in follow up meeting

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Article we discussed in follow up meeting

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I am working through my state's "Literacy Plan." There are several instructional practices that get the "thumbs down" here as being "not in alignment with evidence-based instruction." The list is long and includes guided reading, leveled readers, and informal reading inventories. I'm curious what your take on those practices is? Shanahan response:
Thanks for sharing.

The list you sent was long and I agree with your state on some of the items (e.g., three-cueing, miscue analysis, balanced literacy - whatever that is), but I suspect those who are calling the shots are reacting more to social media buzz words than to any real knowledge about classroom teaching or reading research.

Let's just explore those three examples that you highlighted above - guided reading, leveled readers, and informal reading inventories.

Should those really be banned or seriously discouraged by state education departments?

I get that everybody wants to be "cool" but banning practices because the Twitterverse doesn't seem to like them is a dopey way to make policy.

What's the problem with "guided reading?"

I suspect this one is at least in part a definitional issue. Perhaps it's more of a complaint with Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell's use of the term. Their concept of guided reading carries lots of baggage, including the emphasis on matching kids to texts by reading levels, minimization of explicit and planful instruction, and the emphasis on 3-cueing systems.

If those were the hallmarks of guided reading, then your state would be on the mark.

However, the term "guided reading" is now more than a century old, and the concept the term has been used to describe is much more specific and sensible than the F&P version. I think if we go with its more widely used meaning, it is a concept well worth preserving. That doesn't mean that guided reading in practice is always a good thing - no, I'd admit many teachers use it badly. But I'd rather see your state providing guidance to teachers in how to implement guided reading well in their classrooms than banning or discouraging the practice.

What is guided reading?

The term refers to the group reading of text under the guidance or direction of a teacher or group leader. Most often, this guidance takes the form of a series of questions asked by the leader.

Guided reading experiences as such provide readers with social opportunities to practice their reading comprehension as well as to gain knowledge from the texts being read.

Originally, guided reading was an adult education practice. Benjamin Franklin, for instance, created a successful guided reading group, the Junto, in the 18 th century. This was a tool of self-education used by Franklin and his leather-aproned buddies. They'd read books communally and then discuss their content and value. Franklin even provided a list of questions that could be used to guide the reading discussions.

It wasn't until the 1920s that guided reading formally became a part of the daily practice of American elementary schools; that was when basal reader publishers began providing lesson plans for the selections in their textbooks. Teachers were to convene instructional groups that would read the selections together and then talk about them by answering the teacher's questions.

These kinds of communal reading experiences have a long history in education at all levels and in many cultures. It is hard to imagine teaching someone to read without including this kind of guided or directed reading practice.

Of course, there are a variety of versions of guided reading. In the U.S., especially in modern times, it's not unusual for kids to be encouraged to develop varied interpretations of the shared reading stories. While in some cultures, one of the purposes of the guided reading is to ensure that everyone accepts an official text interpretation. You'll see more questioning in the former case, and more leader explanation in the latter.

Even within American culture, there are important variations on the kinds of reading guidance provided. The teaching of comprehension strategies, for example, usually introduces strategies within the context of guided reading lessons. The teacher demonstrates how to use a strategy and then students try to use it with a group read selection.

Often, in such lessons, the point is less to gain the text information and more to learn to apply the strategy.

Textbook versions of guided reading have often emphasized the mastery of comprehension skills. This has been done by having teachers ask certain kinds of questions as this supposedly would improve the students' ability to answer such questions. (This approach isn't particularly effective. But its failure has not been due to guided reading, but to the wrongheaded idea that question answering is a generalizable or transferable skill.)

These days comprehension skills and strategy teaching are often criticized by those who think that time would be better used in helping students to increase their knowledge of the world. However, these critics aren't opposed to guided reading, they are just advocating a different emphasis to the practice. That's where concepts like close reading come in, a guided reading approach that emphasizes a more thorough analysis of text content. Not surprisingly, guided reading of text is a widely used approach to review content information in science and social studies classes.

Personally, some form of guided reading of shared texts would be a centerpiece of my reading comprehension instruction (which would be accompanied by strong instructional efforts to build word knowledge - including phonics, morphology, and vocabulary, oral reading fluency, and writing/spelling).

Of course, if it makes your state department of education happy, I'd gladly refer to guided reading as "directed reading." Perhaps they'd be more comfortable with that (you don't see many mentions of directed reading on social media). That's what one of the basal reader companies did in the 1950s to differentiate their group reading lessons from those of the "Dick and Jane readers." A rose by any other name... well you know.

I don't want to put too fine a point on this, but I guess I'm saying that I think your state would be making a mistake to discourage guided reading.

he next practice to be avoided - according to your state - is the use of "leveled readers."

This one makes me nervous, because I don't think anyone has written more than I about the problems of teaching kids at their instructional level in grades 2-12.

But, even with that admission, I'm a little lost about how we teach kids to read without having kids read texts.

No, I get it, the mandate isn't against using text to teach reading, only against using leveled text.

However, what texts don't have levels? What texts can't be placed upon a continuum of difficulty?

Let's face it, some texts are harder than others. Yes, and some are easier. And, we can measure or estimate those levels.

Studies show that even decodable texts have difficulty levels - are we going to ban those, too?

There are various problems with leveled texts, and I agree that we should be careful not to make those mistakes again, but the notion that schools should rid their shelves of books with levels would mean that no books would have a place in education.

What mistakes must we avoid?

Well, the F&P approach to book leveling encouraged the use of so-called "predictable texts" with beginning readers. Predictable texts repeat whole sections of text to make them easily readable... "I like candy. I like toys. I like bikes. I like swimming." Such books have value but not for teaching reading.

Research shows that such books discourage students from looking at the words, and it can be hard to learn to read if you don't look at the words.

The F&P leveling scheme didn't pay much attention to decodability and that's a mistake, too. Early reading books need to be relatively easy, and that ease should come from decodability and word repetition (using certain words again and again throughout a text).

Also, leveled readers have been used to ensure that students were placed in books that would be relatively easy to read - books that were supposedly at the students' instructional levels. Research shows this to be a weak approach to instruction in Grades 2-12 (not totally ineffective, that is kids can learn from such texts, but higher reading levels can be accomplished using more challenging text - that is, books at higher levels). I'd teach most students reading using texts at their grade levels rather than at their so-called instructional levels. However, if the books aren't leveled how will we know which ones are most appropriate for a grade level?

Leveled readers aren't the problem so I wouldn't ban them... though some of the ways those leveled readers have been used should go!

Okay, the last item on this list is the informal reading inventory (IRI). This instrument has students reading grade-level representative passages aloud and the teacher calculates the oral reading accuracy and the students' comprehension of the passage to determine a student's reading level.

Historically, the IRI was used to place students in reading books. Usually this meant placing them in books out of grade level (you know, fourth graders being taught to read with second grade books). As I pointed out earlier, this approach hasn't panned out, so testing to make such placements would not be how I would use IRIs today.

I've long argued for teaching reading with grade level texts. In my version of guided reading, the teacher would review a text prior to the group reading. She would try to identify those text features that may block student reading success (e.g., words the students might have trouble decoding, unknown word meanings, literary devices, complex syntax, subtle cohesive ties, unusual text structure, knowledge gaps, and so on). Her guidance should then both make visible the problems her students had with the text and provide them with tools for successfully dealing with those barriers.

Examples of this kind of support would include things like showing students how to use context to figure out a key word meaning or how to break down a complicated key sentence so that it can be comprehended (tools students could use with other texts).

The benefits to having IRI estimates of student reading levels is that it informs the teacher as to who is likely to need the most help and how much help might be necessary. If I'm teaching a group of 4 th graders with a 4 th grade book, it would be useful to me to know that half the group was reading at a second-grade level. I'll need to provide more support to a group like that than I would with a group in which most of the kids are reading at a 3 rd or 4 th grade level. I'd schedule the time differently in those cases and I might be on the lookout for different kinds of barriers in those situations. In one case, I might do more oral reading fluency work, for instance.

Your state's approach here reminds me of lists of vegetables to avoid serving children, since kids don't like vegetables. I'd rather have suggestions of ways to prepare those vegetables so that even finicky kids might enjoy them. ("Skip the creamed spinach, it's too much like baby food. But spinach and strawberry salad can be a hit among the preschool set.")

The problem with discouraging the use of guided reading, leveled books, and informal reading inventories is that it ignores the pedagogical value of those tools. It focuses teacher attention on tool avoidance (trying to look like somebody thinks they should look), rather than on how to deliver effective instruction. Personally, I'd make use of all these tools in my teaching. Please pass the spinach.

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leveled books; guided reading; informal reading inventories

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My state is banning instructional practices... or, how to look like you are teaching effectively...

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Recently, states have begun discouraging or prohibiting various instructional practices in the name of the science of reading. While some of these choices make sense, in many cases states seem to be trying to look like the understand the science of reading because they are banning useful methods that have become unpopular with some groups.

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Unpacking Standards Double Bubble Process

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(condensed version)

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Although we may not be aware of it, we do not skip over words, read print selectively, or recognize words by sampling a few letters of the print, as whole language theorists proposed in the 1970s. Reading is accomplished with letter-by-letter processing of the word.

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ASBarcelona Leadership Day - September 2023 (1)

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ASBarcelona Leadership Day - September 2023

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Unpacking school culture to understand your "Why"

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Unpacking school culture to understand your "Why"

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This article appeared as "Paradox Found" in the Spring 2022 issue of Independent School.

School A defines its culture as innovative and cutting-edge. They say, "No other school does it like we do." In reality, this school is out of touch with what is happening outside the campus, and it doesn't see that the school may not be as innovative as the community thinks-either nationally or in the local market.How can this school more accurately see its culture?

School B prides itself on its community spirit and the rituals and traditions that bring the community together-many of which have been celebrated for generations of graduates. Yet many of these are grounded in the past and disconnected from the community that now exists. Some may be repellant-even hurtful-to members of the community.Can a school be inclusive while holding up traditions that are by nature exclusive?

School C, a historically selective high school has been known for educating the "best and the brightest" with a rigorous academic experience. The school now finds itself in a softer market, woefully out of step with students who crave more relevant experiences and bring more neurodiverse profiles.How will its culture need to shift so the school can serve learners in new ways?

School D has always defined its culture as nurturing, warm, and deeply personalized-made possible by small class sizes that have allowed every student to develop close relationships with their teachers and peers. It's the magic of the school. But the school's long-term financial strategy points to increasing class size and downsizing the faculty.What will be the magic now?

Talking about school culture can be a bit like wrestling with a shadow. It's ambiguous and hard to grasp, as these ever-so-common scenarios demonstrate. Still, it's there, lurking behind everything we do. And it is this-the way that independent schools talk about their cultures-that both defines and distinguishes themand keeps them stuck.

In our work, we often witness schools grappling with their culture and reckoning with their cultural barriers. Their own culture is getting in the way. But perhaps the greatest obstacle for schools when it comes to the healthy evolution of their culture is the inability to honestly see it-or to clearly articulate it.

Blinded by nostalgia for a culture that once was-or maybe never was-they struggle to diagnose the parts that need to change. Our love for our schools can make it harder to see the reality that others experience. If you are absolutely certain about the health, relevance, and coherence of your school culture, you might be lying to yourself.
Why We Lie to Ourselves
This deception is unintentional, of course. What we tell ourselves about our culture may be less of a lie and more of a distortion of reality that we continue to perpetuate through the stories we tell and by looking for evidence that confirms our beliefs. But why?

Our memories are anchored in the past, and over time they become more positive. Call it the Gatsby dilemma. As time passes, we imagine the perfection of a time that may not have even existed. But it's comforting to remember that time and be associated with it-even if we weren't there. We tend to bring forward the stories of success and share them until they become part of the filter we use to view our schools.

We were founded on exclusivity and, secretly, many of us like it. "Inclusive" is a word with a positive connotation in our culture; interestingly, the word "exclusive" can have a positive connotation as well. Knowing that the culture we now belong to has a history of selectivity makes some of us feel special. Even some who recognize the need to undo a culture that has excluded people based on race, religion, or sexuality still find other forms of exclusivity appealing-the process of "being admitted" to a school inherently suggests that the school isn't for everyone and those who have been invited are part of the "club."

We cannot accurately see the culture we are a part of. Like we do in our own families, we make assumptions about the way things are, and we are incapable of seeing something else because we are so deeply embedded in our culture. It's as invisible as the air we breathe.

We see what we want to see, and "what was" may no longer exist. A school leader once confidently shared how the school had a really unique culture of humor and play. The example he shared was a prank someone had played nearly 10 years ago. When asked for a more recent example, he stumbled a bit and came up empty. As someone who joined the school early in his career and who had spent the subsequent years rising through the ranks, his sense of the school was formed by experiences of a culture that was no longer in practice.

We fail to nurture healthy cultures because we listen to the stories we tell ourselves. It's why new arrivals are often the best sources of information about our culture: They see it with fresh eyes.
Noticing What Culture Does
Those of us who have been in a place for a while need to start by acknowledging the confirmation bias we bring to conversations about school culture. Rather than looking for reassurance that our culture is the way we want it to be, we should consciously look for disconfirmation. And rather than focusing on what people tell you the culture is, we should spend time paying attention to what the culture does.

This means paying attention to behaviors, rituals, and artifacts-the three observable manifestations of culture identified by Edgar Schein, organizational theorist and former professor at MIT Sloan School of Management.

Rituals: Rituals are repeated actions, which are often imbued with special significance through repetition. Does your meeting always start the same way-and is that purposeful or accidental? When do you gather your entire community together? Do you give awards, and what is rewarded? What events mark the cyclical passage of time throughout the day and year?

At some schools we've worked with, the routine student gathering invites students to stand in a circle and share an announcement, a reflection, or a gratitude in the moment. The group as a whole may have a ritual, like a group clap, to open the event and to close the experience. At other schools, the routine student gathering requires students to sit in rows quietly while adults talk at them, and the opening and closing of the gathering is announced by an adult. Each of those rituals communicates powerful messages about roles, agency, and power.

Artifacts: What and who is on the walls? What and who isn't? What messages do they communicate about what matters to you? Are there special places at the school-such as a bench-that only certain groups of students ever use? A report card, the school's daily schedule, a portrait of a graduate or other foundational documents are also artifacts that can provide clues to your culture and what you value.

At one school we worked with, there were dozens of black and white photos of retired faculty, all of whom were white. At another, there were well-curated exhibitions of student work with statements from the scholars who created them. At a third, the walls were blank. In each case, these walls reflected-and shaped-culture.

Behaviors: Who interacts regularly? Who never interacts? How do people talk to each other? Who gets to sit where? Who gets to walk where? Who gets to speak at meetings? Who doesn't get to speak? Who doesn't bother to try? Are there spaces where community members behave differently or abide by different rules or expectations?

There's an iconic moment in Mean Girls when Janice Ian shows the main character Cady a map of the cafeteria, pointing out the various groups of people that make up the school community and where they usually sit. Creating a similar map of who sits where during faculty meetings, assemblies, parent association meetings, or in the student center might reveal interesting patterns that are otherwise missed. For example, it might show who sits near people in positional authority, who sits alone, and whether people sit grouped by department, generational cohort, gender, or race.

In addition to charting who sits where, draw a diagram of attendees, and connect a line between any two points when one person speaks and another one responds. The resulting visual will look something like a map of airline routes in the back of an in-flight magazine-many lines with a few key hubs. What does it reveal?

Itis possible to notice things that have become invisible to you. And it's important to notice while deferring evaluation or diagnosis-start by noticing what is before you decide what it means.
Levers to Shape Culture
Once a school leader or team has gotten a clearer view of what the culture actually is, how can they successfully shift those aspects that no longer serve the community? What about parts of the culture that might be repellant, inaccessible, or even hurtful?

In her book Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds, adrienne maree brown shares a set of principles for change based in the natural world that give us a language for shaping and shifting culture. Her work offers two levers particularly helpful for school leaders.

"Adapt," don't "disrupt." It may be necessary to disrupt static thinking or old habits, but that's different than trying to disrupt culture. Like wildfire, cultural change can be either destructive or adaptive. When a wildfire clears out an area quickly, it takes a long time to regenerate. It's better to ask how a culture can be, as brown says, "intentionally adaptive." Words matter. If you frame changes in the culture as disruptive, they will be experienced that way.

Look for "fractals" in the counterculture. In Emergent Strategy, brown talks about the fractals found in nature, which are "infinitely complex patterns that are self-similar across different scales." Sometimes the counterculture is really just an emerging fractal that demonstrates a small-scale model of what's possible for the whole. "What we practice at the small scale sets the pattern for the whole system," brown writes.

In every organization, there are groups of people functioning in countercultural ways. Often, it's a response to something in the dominant culture that isn't working for everyone. If you see something small that is working, how can you encourage the replication of that idea or practice?

To that end, the next four levers are ways to start at the small scale and let the patterns grow-in other words, to build fractals that can replicate throughout the system.

Model new behavior. This may seem obvious, but we find most teams don't do this intentionally. If we want our communities to shift to new ways of being and doing, the practices must start with leaders and leadership teams. That means taking a really good look at whether you practice what you want to see in your community. If you really want your school culture to adopt new behaviors-let's say a culture of collaboration or a culture of honest feedback-then you need to be actively pursuing and modeling that behavior with your team.

Design new artifacts. Start looking at the artifacts in your school as changing installations, not permanent exhibits. Simple changes to artifacts send a message to the community and also begin to shift patterns of behavior. For example, if your school has been singing the single-note "college prep" tune for decades, you probably have a college counseling office filled with pennants from colleges and universities. What are all of those pennants communicating to students about who they are and ultimately what your school is helping them to become? What if you wanted to communicate that where someone goes to college is not a measure of who they are as a person? What artifacts might you create?

Create new rituals. Nothing at your school has been that way forever; it just feels that way. Traditions are just innovations that were created long enough ago that we can't imagine our worlds without them. (If you're a stand-alone middle school, that means four years ago.) If rituals are the community gatherings that exhibit and build culture, then evolving rituals to reflect the culture you desire is critical.

Tell new stories. Although what we say is less important than what we do, stories can have an impact on culture-especially those that are mythologized over time. We once worked with a school that always touted an award it had received for being a regional industry leader. When the school, 20 years later, had not received another award, a new narrative began to emerge-about decline. When we really looked at the story, it had been distorted over many years and had trapped the school into a "halcyon era" that had never existed. When a new school leader came in, he had to look more objectively at this story. He saw the way the story was keeping the school from evolving. It had become, as author and coaching consultant Elena Aguilar calls it, a "rut story." The stories the new leader chose to tell about the school were not stuck in the past, but pointed the community toward the present and the future.

Remember: There's no "I" in culture. The innovation adoption curve is hardly new, but it is useful. It reminds us that, like any change, cultural change is gradual, and it hits different pockets of a school at different moments. No leader can effect cultural change on her own. But what about those countercultures that developed? Often, they're exactly what you need to pioneer new directions in your culture, model alternative ways of doing, or spread new practices. Savvy school leaders will look for others who will also create new rituals, artifacts, behaviors, and stories. They will choose whose examples to amplify and elevate. They will find ways to offer exposure to new ways of acting.
The Need for Culture to Evolve
We have entered a new geological age, the "Anthropocene," characterized by human influence on the Earth's climate and natural resources. Other forces are leading to major disruptions as well-the internet, globalization, COVID-19, and a broad awakening to social inequities in the world will require cultures to adapt to stay relevant in the world our students will inhabit.

Culture is strong, but it is not fixed. Cultures are formed by groups of people over time, and they can be shifted by groups of people over time. The job of school leaders is not to preserve culture in a static form, but rather to shape it to meet the changing world.

Beginner's Mindset
To conjure the "fresh eyes" newcomers bring so naturally, it's important to take a posture of inquiry. Here are some questions you might explore and answer with your team:

How do we know that what we believe and say about our culture is true?

What if everything we believe about our culture is wrong? What would we see or hear that might tell us that?

What behaviors, artifacts, and rituals are emerging in the school? What purpose do they serve?

Which elements of our culture do we want to amplify or elevate?

What values do we want to strengthen with new artifacts?

If our founding story and the narratives we have subsequently told ourselves are grounded in being "elite and exclusive," how might we shift our behaviors and actions to tell a new story that is more aligned with modern values and, often, our mission statements?

What if parts of our culture are outdated and out of sync with what the world, our students, and our families need right now?

Which artifacts, rituals, or behaviors are holding us back?

What is the difference between how we market ourselves and our authentic culture?

What are the financial or market realities forcing cultural change? How will we respond?

What if our mission statement has evolved but our culture has not caught up?

What is the resistance to evolving the culture? Who is most resistant to change? What will we have to give up or lose to evolve our culture? What might be gained?

Tools for Noticing Culture
Take a deep breath and set out to be a learner-not a knower-in your school. Do the things an anthropologist would do. Use an observer's toolkit and be curious as you explore your culture. Look for the pockets of change happening. Wonder. Reflect out what you see. Here are some ways to get started.

Shadow a student. The core of a Shadow a Student day is a commitment to seeing the school from a student's perspective, from morning until after school. Most adults only deeply understand their own colored block on the schedule; students experience those blocks as a series of juxtaposed, often dissonant experiences that evoke their own meanings. Check out the Stanford d.School's Shadow a Student Challenge (dschool.stanford.edu/shadow-a-student-k12) for more insights and ideas or reach out to Leadership+Design for a copy of our Shadow a Student guide.

Collect images. Working for one public school district to understand their culture of learning, we distributed disposable cameras to students and teachers and asked them to document their day. The images became an important collection of the learner's-eye/teacher's-eye view. It's not neutral, and it doesn't seek to be. Instead, it reveals what matters to the humans who live the culture daily.

Look at your schedule and calendar like an ethnographer.
The one thing schools can't get more of is time. It's no wonder why efforts to rethink a school's schedule or calendar can be so emotionally intense. Often, we fail to see the values and priorities that are embedded in our use of time because they just look or feel normal.

Share your schedule and calendar with someone from another school. What do they notice? What do they wonder? Then, make a list of the reasons why the schedule gets disrupted. Which assemblies deserve a special schedule? Which programs get early dismissals? Those are also important indicators of what your school really values.

For more insights and ideas to think like an ethnographer, check out "Survey Says: Ethnographic Research Can Provide Valuable Insights" in the Winter 2018 Independent School.

Independent Ideas Blog

Instructional Coaching: 5 Principles for a Successful Practice

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How Schools Talk About and Notice School Culture

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This article appeared as "Paradox Found" in the Spring 2022 issue of Independent School. School A defines its culture as innovative and cutting-edge. They say, "No other school does it like we do."

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Resources to Support Vocabulary Instruction

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Resources to Support Vocabulary Instruction

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Resources to Support Phonics Instruction

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Resources to Support Phonics Instruction

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Peter Senge Introduction to Systems Thinking